There's no doubt the collapse of Ansett Australia 10 years ago was a massive blow to the airline industry.

Now at last Ansett employees are set to receive all final payments, but questions of profiteering and responsibility remain.

Tracey Kirkland reports.

TRACEY KIRKLAND, REPORTER: From heady years to emotional drama almost overnight - the sudden collapse of an Australian carrier, thousands of stranded passengers and around 17,000 bewildered staff members suddenly without jobs.

Air New Zealand had bought the already ailing airline just 18 months before, so its crash, announced in the middle of the night, caught most by surprise.

Former customer services clerk Dennis Bell saw the last plane arrive into Brisbane.

DENNIS BELL, FORMER ANSETT EMPLOYEE: We simply brought all the folks off and took the bags off, locked the aeroplane up and locked the terminal up and everyone went home.

TRACEY KIRKLAND: It was a similar story across the country. Former leading hand David Lupton had been with Ansett 27 years.

DAVID LUPTON, FORMER ANSETT EMPLOYEE: People just thought, well, you know, this is a joke. How can we be going bad? And then, one day, they just locked the doors.

TRACEY KIRKLAND: The end of the airline, but not the end of the story. Staff were still owed more than $750 million in entitlements.

It's been a long time coming, but finally the administrators KordaMentha say they've now sold all of Ansett's assets and will provide final payments in about three months. That's on top of final superannuation payments which are expected next month. In the end, staff will receive close to 95 per cent of their entitlements.

DENNIS BELL: If you take as an analogy One.Tel and HIH, if you look at the way their folks were treated during the collapse of those companies, I think that what KordaMentha and the unions have done has been a wonderful thing for the Ansett people.

TRACEY KIRKLAND: Closure for some, but all too late for those former Ansett employees who took their own lives and others who still bear emotional scars.

DAVID LUPTON: Even today, a lot of people owe money to their families. They just can't pay it back because they never got back on their feet again.

TRACEY KIRKLAND: Initial anger at the owners Air New Zealand has not subsided, neither has accusations the Howard Government profiteered from the $10 ticket tax it added to flight prices.

TONY SHELDON, TRANSPORT WORKERS UNION: The profit that was made by the Howard years should be paid to those employees that the profit's supposed to have served.

TRACEY KIRKLAND: Which means the final chapter of the Ansett story may be yet to be written.